Jekyll And Hyde Meet Mother Earth

Americans Have Split Personalities When It Comes To The Environment: Save The Whales But Don't You Dare Touch My Range Rover

February 25, 1996|By Hugh Dellios. and Hugh Dellios is a Tribune staff writer in the L.A. bureau and commutes to work in a Pathfinder.

The wilderness stretching north of Phoenix, through Arizona's Painted Desert and into Utah's breathtaking canyonlands, is always the site of some environmental battle. Right now it's over how much land to preserve in Utah, and polls show a majority of Americans favor protecting miles of it.

Everyone would recognize this supposedly precious land. It's the terrain you see in the newest television commercials for the fancy, gas-guzzling Pathfinders, Explorers and Range Rovers that are all the rage. They splash through pristine creeks and grind rocks beneath their mammoth tires.

Come get away from it all, the commercials say. Enjoy some wilderness by leaving tire tracks across it.

Well, no wonder the makers of law and policy in Washington and so many state capitals are falling over themselves trying to figure out what the American public wants with environmental policy.

For 25 years, we've been acting like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in how we approach Mother Earth, or make that Dr. Junkman and Mr. Hydrology. We tell pollsters we want the environment protected, but aside from recycling at our kids' insistence, our habits don't always match our words.

Remember the national crusade to conserve energy during the 1970s oil embargo, what Henry Kissinger called "the economic equivalent of the Sputnik challenge?"

Sure you do. And so do all the speeders pushing the pedal to the metal on highways in Montana and elsewhere now that the lid is off the speed limit and gasoline prices, which adjusted for inflation are much lower than they were 10 years ago.

Oil consumption is way up, despite all the polls saying Americans don't want oil companies to drill on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Along the freeways through California's Central Valley, signs are posted in farmers' fields railing at rats, other protected critters and the bloody bureaucrats who would exalt them.

In one breath, farmers condemn those damn "enviro-meddlists." With the next breath, they're claiming to be the real and only environmentalists because they're the ones who live on the land.

It's a refrain heard in the villages along Alaska's Arctic coast, too, where residents say they want to see oil rigs spread out across the refuge, bringing jobs. But they wouldn't want to harm the places they hunt and fish.

"It's our grocery store out there," said the former mayor of Kaktovik, Alaska.

And what about the rest of us? How many of us can pass a Nature Company store and not duck inside, gaze at the gemstones and coffee-table books about safaris in Africa, imagining ourselves as Indiana Jones naturalists?

Then it's wakeup time, and the consumptive shopping sprees continue, and grocery bags are packed with issues of Outside magazine and tubs of Rain Forest Crunch ice cream, to be consumed later in front of the television set.

Pristine woods and woodsmen have always been part of folklore, starting with the original "Pathfinder," James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, and Thoreau at Walden searching for simplicity.

Today, it's more like action-hero Steven Seagal and his silly movie "On Deadly Ground." In it he saves a piece of Alaskan natives' sacred land by blowing up an entire oil platform, spewing a storm of black smoke and who knows what carcinogenic particulates into the atmosphere.

Somewhere in all this are lessons for Newt Gingrich's Republican revolutionaries and their anti-regulation agenda. The American public has come to demand and expect a certain level of environmental protection. Some symbols, like the bald eagle and the Grand Canyon, are untouchable.

And it's starting to look like some laws are too, which is why the revolutionaries are reconsidering their winner-take-all efforts to roll back 25 years of environmental policy.

On the other hand, it was the split personality in the American consciousness that allowed the onslaught in the first place. The Republicans simply punched the button labeled "paychecks," arguing that overzealous environmental regulations were putting Mom and Pop out of business.

In response, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups simply pushed the other button, the one labeled "toxic greed," pointing out that the industry lobbyists who were writing the proposed reforms were the real beneficiaries. Suddenly, the public opinion polls weren't backing Gingrich & Co. anymore.

Mention "big industry" and Americans don't argue with environmental safeguards. Mention Mom and Pop, and they're not so sure, even if Mom and Pop are clear-cutting spotted owl habitat or pumping out leaded sludge.

The images of Love Canal, Three Mile Island and the Exxon Valdez are still fresh in our minds. The conscience-raising lessons of Earth Day still resonate.

On the other hand, time breeds complacency, as does endless apocalyptic rhetoric from the environmental movement and some true success stories like--believe it or not--Los Angeles' cleaner air.